What makes
this enterprise SSD different?

If you've been involved in one of those projects
recently trying to decide which SSD supplier to choose for your strategic,
mission critical, server future - then you've probably read more articles about
this subject and pored over more benchmarks than you expected when you began.

It
seems like the more you read - the more you have to know.

A lot of
readers have told me they spend days reading what I've written about SSDs and
sometimes it seems like they're going around in circles because just when they
have satisfied their needs to understand one strand which surrounds this topic
they discover another piece of information which opens up another new loop
they have to master - or flatly contradicts something which they thought they
had previously understood only a few loops before.

Is there a conspiracy
of SSD bloggers and vendors to churn out thousands of SSD articles to
obscure the handful of simple SSD sub atomic truth particles which really
explain everything?

In one way that's true.

Reason being -
the enterprise SSD world is still evolving.

As in particle phsyics we
do some experiments based on the shape of things we understand with the
current level of technology - and then discover that there are some other little
things out there which weren't so obvious before.

So if we create an
SSD model which says that all CPUs and software only know about hard drives -
you get one type of optimal SSD solution....

But then a few years
later if some CPUs and software know about SSDs - maybe that changes how they
behave - and as the SSDs get cheaper and faster and smarter (and everywhere)
it's possible to do market experiments which wouldn't have been feasible before.

an
end to SSD article loops

If you're tired of going round infinite
SSD article loops I can offer you a small number of indivisible SSD
architecture principles - which - if you understand them - will make it simpler
for you to predict and model most of the important behavior and quirky
performance and reliability characterirstics of almost any enterprise SSD that
you will read about.

All SSD personalities are dominated by just a
handful of design parameters. If you know these SSD architecture quarks /
quirks you can go a long way to understanding and predicting SSD
system behavior. Here's my little list of articles.

Nor anything
much about
SSD reliability
engineering. These are problems for your vendor's SSD designers to worry about
and not for you. There are many different ways to achieve similar product goals
using vastly different starting points in the reliability of their memory parts
(depending how clever the SSD oems are and their business models).

And
I haven't said anything about
SSD prices or
interfaces or form
factors - because you're only going to look at SSDs you can afford,
connect to and which fit in your box. Those aren't the differences which start
the midnight SSD article loops spinning.

There are only 2 more
articles which I'll add to my list above to make it complete.